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Velvet Cream
Put a pint and a quarter of milk into a saucepan with a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar, the thin rind of half a lemon, and an inch of stick cinnamon. Let it simmer till pleasantly flavored. Put 2 dessertspoonfuls of Oswego into a basin, and mix with it 4 well-beaten eggs. Strain the milk when it is cool into the eggs, and stir the custard over the fire till it begins to thicken, but it must not boil. Stir it off the fire till it is almost cold, add a few drops of vanilla essence, and pour it into a glass dish over sponge cakes or ratafias soaked in sherry and covered with jam. Let it stand in a cool situation three or four hours before serving. Time, about twenty minutes to simmer the milk with the flavoring.
A stirred custard poured over sherry-soaked cake — essentially a trifle set with a little starch rather than gelatine. The whole dish turns on the temperature of the custard.
- Never let it boilTake the custard to about 175-180F, when it coats the spoon and leaves a clear track when you draw a finger through it. Above roughly 185F the eggs begin to curdle, and the small amount of starch here is not enough to protect them; pull the pan off the heat at the first sign of thickening.
- OswegoOswego was a widely sold brand of cornstarch (English cooks called it corn flour). Use plain cornstarch, measured level.
- DessertspoonfulA dessertspoon is about 2 teaspoons, so 2 dessertspoonfuls is roughly 4 teaspoons — a little over a tablespoon of cornstarch for the whole quantity. That is a light set, not a firm one.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone. A quarter pound of granulated sugar, about half a cup, is the direct equivalent.
- The milk quantityA pint and a quarter is ambiguous in a book of this period: 20 fl oz to the imperial pint gives about 3 cups, an American pint gives 2 1/2 cups. Either works; the smaller quantity gives a richer custard.
- "Strain the milk when it is cool"The text says cool; in practice this is usually taken to mean lukewarm rather than cold, warm enough to slacken the starch mixture but not hot enough to scramble the eggs. Add it to the eggs in a thin stream while whisking.
- Stirring off the heatKeeping it moving as it cools stops a skin forming and stops the residual heat in the pan carrying the eggs past the point of no return. Pouring it into a cold bowl speeds this up.
- RatafiasSmall crisp almond macaroons, sold in Britain as ratafia biscuits; amaretti are the closest supermarket substitute. Sponge fingers or leftover plain sponge cake do the same job.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no number of servings. The three to four hours in a cool place is not optional -- the custard needs it to firm up and the sherry needs it to soak through the cake.
"Velvet cream" was a common name in Victorian and Edwardian household books for a pale, barely-set cream served cold in a glass dish, the word describing the texture rather than a fixed formula; some versions set with isinglass or gelatine, others, like this one, with a spoonful of starch and eggs. The Oswego points to the second half of the nineteenth century: cornstarch milled at Oswego, New York, was sold widely enough from the mid-1800s that the place name was used in recipe books on both sides of the Atlantic as a term for the product, much as "corn flour" was in Britain. The construction underneath -- sponge cake or ratafias soaked in sherry, spread with jam, drowned in custard -- is straightforwardly a trifle, and the recipe is a useful reminder of how thoroughly the trifle idea had spread through the period's puddings under other names.